Just Before the Dawn, I Awake and Find Yuggoth

While
Richard Pickman’s photographic model for his disturbing series of genre
paintings of 1926-7 may technically
be a horrifying, part-canine, subterranean humanoid who ventures forth from
deep underground through a well in Pickman’s basement to munch and crunch on
human brains, deep down, he’s just misunderstood. He grew up in the
subterranean humanoid foster system following a neglectful childhood in a
single-subterranean-humanoid-mother household, and no one ever asked for his
hand in amity, or in love. No one has ever even asked him his name (FYI, it’s
Earl). Though unable to communicate except through barks, grunts, screams,
growls, and thirsty slurps of blood, bone marrow and brain matter, he, too, has
dreams and aspirations. He has recently taken a bath and undergone potty,
behavior and elocution training, as well as receiving a full battery of rabies
and infectious disease vaccinations. Following rave reviews for his sittings
for Pickman, Earl is currently looking for modelling work in America and abroad.
His headshots can be obtained by contacting his agent, Edward Hutchinson, at
Mephitic Models Los Angeles. The press has described his showings as “something
else,” “unorthodox,” and “surprising.” Look for him in Tom Ford’s Spring 2019
collection and on the runway at Milan Fashion Week.

12. Richard Pickman

A
criminally underrated master painter
living and working in the Boston area in the early 20th century,
Richard Pickman specialized in notoriously lifelike, niche American genre
paintings. Very, very niche. Reputed
to be of such low birth that his ancestry was borderline underground,he puts his
blood, sweat and tears right on the canvas. Well, maybe not his blood, sweat or tears, but someone’s.

11. Lost Cities &
Undiscovered Worlds

From the
ruined Antarctic mega-metropolis in At
the Mountains of Madness, to Cthulhu’s watery tomb in the dead sunken city
of R’lyeh, to the unknown and unknowable cosmic spatial oddities seen in “From
Beyond,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” and many
more, Lovecraft had an obsession with lost cities, abandoned ruins,
undiscovered country, and heretofore unknown worlds, galaxies, universes, and
dimensions. Some are almost human and almost familiar, as from a
half-remembered dream, and many others lie far beyond the pitiful limitations
of human senses to behold. Fittingly, most of Lovecraft’s lost cities are
peopled with creatures and entities as bizarre and uninviting as the landscapes
themselves.

Pity the
poor souls that dared to call themselves Lovecraft’s travel agents. He must
have gone through them like popcorn on movie night…..

“No, Howard, for the
last time, I can’t book you passage for any eldritch Cyclopean ruins. I don’t
even know what that means. How about Rome? They have lots of ruins. Stamboul
too. Or maybe a riverboat up the Mississippi?”

“But I long to see the
cosmic twilit abysses of the realm of Yog-Sothoth, and to behold risen R’lyeh,
ominously heaved up from the sea bed to herald the coming of dead Cthulhu.”

“Howard, good buddy.
That’s gonna be a hard no. But I do have an attractive all-inclusive package
for two to Poughkeepsie. They say the beekeeping is excellent this time of
year…”

“Then I’d like first
class accommodations to a blasphemous dreamscape on Yuggoth or the dread
plateau of Leng.”

“No dread plateaus. No
blasphemous dreamscapes. No Atlantean hellscapes. No moodscapes either. No
scapes at all. We don’t do scapes, Howard. Just vacations. Vacations to real
places on planet Earth. A nice little gondola through Venice comes to mind.”

“In that case, if I
were to take a bus to Innsmouth, would your travel insurance cover lost luggage
in the event that I must flee my hotel room in that decadent city by moonlight
while being hunted by a battalion of immortal fish-frog men?”

“….Siiiiiigggghhhh…”

10. Innsmouth

Innsmouth,
Massachussetts has a secret, and it’s a big one. It’s an even bigger secret
than your closeted gay uncle’s Cancun tryst with Esteban in 1997. This
once-prosperous fishing port has been in a shocking state of decline and decay
for nearly 150 years. It was selected in 93 consecutive annual reader polls in Better Homes & Gardens magazine as
the worst town in America. It’s as aesthetically attractive as a gas station
toilet, and smells even worse. The unusually long-lived population has
flatlined at around 400 people since the 1920’s. Guinness World Records has
awarded it a prize for being the world’s only inhabited ghost town. For a
seaside port, there is surprisingly little sunshine, and the town has
a….surprisingly active nightlife.

Might I
recommend Poughkeepsie instead?

9. The Necronomicon

An exhaustive catalogue of
abominable knowledge of sorcery and necromancy, compiled by the “mad Arab,”
Abdul Alhazred, in the 8th c. A.D. The unholy spells contained
within its covers essentially allow its reader to do everything evil. The book
would not be surpassed as the worst and most BONE-HEADED book ever written
until O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It in
2007. Some knowledge is best left unknown.

8. Dreams

For Lovecraft’s unfortunate
heroes, dreams are seldom, if ever, pleasant, innocuous, or meaningless. The
more sensitive or clairvoyant among us are frequently cursed with diabolical
night visions of world-ending horrors, abysmal hellscapes, unspeakable cosmic
devils, yawning chasms of destruction and genocide, and more personal
encounters with more down-to-earth nasties like witches and seas of
flesh-ripping rats.

Lovecraft
himself, the author of all this unpleasantness, likely had worse dreams than
any of his characters. He officially had the worst dreams in the world until
David Lynch came on the cultural scene 40 years after Lovecraft’s death. I was
alright for a while, I could smile for a while….until I read Lovecraft, and
until I saw Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and
Mulholland Drive. I’m still crying.

7. Miskatonic
University

Miskatonic
University is no more than three degrees of separation from nearly every awful
person, place or thing in the entire Lovecraft canon. For sensible college
hopefuls, Miskatonic is on a short list of schools to avoid at all costs, in
questionable company with DeVry University and Heaven’s Gate Medical School.
Miskatonic’s library and archives are said to house the largest collection of
rare occult manuscripts and objects in the western hemisphere, including a copy
of the Necronomicon. Sure would be a
shame if it were to burn down….

On a related note, the university is
very pleased to announce several key new additions to its faculty and
administration. Beginning in the Spring ’19 semester, Dr. Jordan Peterson will
be Dean of the Psychology Department, David Horowitz will be the chairman and
professor of the newly endowed Humanitarian and Religious Tolerance Department,
and Dr. Camille Paglia will be a new professor in the Gender and Feminist
Studies Department.

6. Azathoth

Said by the Necronomicon to be the
Ruler of all time and space, Lord of all things, and a mindless, blind idiot
god who rules from a black throne at the center of Chaos, Azathoth is pacified
like a tiny little baby by the eternal piping of daemoniac flutes, which must
surely be even more annoying than regular flutes. It is surely an utterly
incompetent, grotesque deity who has no business ruling anything. Azathoth is a
true nightmare of a Supreme Deity for all its subjects, like a braindead Yahweh
on life support, who rules the universe in name only and simply lets the chips
fall where they may. Neither omnipotent, omniscient, nor benevolent, Azathoth
more or less wiles away the eons in a space coma, chilling out and dancing
idiotically to its precious little flutes.

Azathoth is completely unable to
maintain peace and order in the cosmos, and allows its own rules of time and
space to be broken all the time by Elder Gods, Outer Gods, Other Gods, Old
Ones, and all manner of witches, wizards, sorcerers, vampires, monstrous fungi,
and many other intergalactic miscreants. This space tyrant has become famous in
recent years for its incessant and unhinged racist Twitter rants, fascist
dictatorial tendencies, and a haunting cosmic yellow hairpiece that’s an object
of ridicule in literally every known world and universe.

5. The Colour Out of
Space

Possibly
Lovecraft’s most mysterious, indiscriminately destructive, and dispassionately
sadistic entity. The colour out of space, or the “blasphemy from beyond,”
arrived west of Arkham, Massachusetts in the form of a strangely colored
globule encased in a small meteorite in 1882. In a matter of months, the
globule had turned a 5-acre plot of fertile land into a desert ruined by an
unknown blight, and degraded and eventually killed the family and all the
livestock, trees, and every other living on and around a nearby farm, in ways
best left to the imagination. And even though whatever was in that meteorite
has been gone for nearly 140 years, the blight still creeps by an inch every
year….

4. Cult of Cthulhu

A worldwide, shadowy, murderous
cabal of genuine weirdos, wackos, creepos, coocoos, pervos, psychos, and
all-around stinkers that has plagued
the world’s polite societies for millennia in service of the liberation of the
rumored “Old One” known as Cthulhu, a titanic undead beast from the stars who
waits in an underwater tomb to be resurrected. These thoroughly unscrupulous, chicanerous,
deplorable, mischievous, deceitful, insubordinate, and churlish ruffians,
ne’er-do-wells, and diabolists can be found scattered in cult colonies found in
the swamps of New Orleans, the mountains of China, the ice sheet of Greenland,
the pathless deserts of Arabia, and the sparse cliffsides of Dunedin. With
membership consisting almost exclusively of people of color, the cult members
routinely engage in kidnappings, voodoo orgies, beating drums by torchlight,
dancing in devil-flames, chanting, human sacrifice, ritual communal dreaming,
and assassinations of any who dare investigate the cult or its sinister doings.
Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies around the world, this
demon-spawn social club of Scientologists and Jonestown Juggalos has only
continued to expand.

3. Joseph Curwen (from
“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)

Some relatives drink too much at
Thanksgiving dinner, or keep giving you the same stupid gifts every Christmas,
like a disposable kiwi peeler or a 2-in-1 catheter/crazy looping drinking
straw. And some relatives….well, I won’t spoil this one. Let’s just say Curwen
was a bad dude. The worst
great-great-great grandpa who ever lived, Joseph Curwen was a relentlessly
evil, psychopathic a-hole who was literally
unbelievably tenacious. I guess my wacky Cousin Raymond who fell for the
Nigerian princess scam isn’t really that bad after all, in the grand scheme of
things.

2. Kamog, aka Ephraim
Waite (from “The Thing on the Doorstep”)

Ephraim Waite apparently took
copious notes from Joseph Curwen on how to be the worst family member in
history, and somehow topped him. I won’t spoil this one either, except to say
that whatever ails Ephraim Waite also ails his daughter Asenath. You might say it runs in the family. And after she
marries her husband, she really does become the worst kind of wife. “She”
doesn’t just want half…she wants everything.

1. Cthulhu

An immortal Old One and immigrant to
Earth from the farthest reaches of the universe, Cthulhu is a titanic dormant
green conqueror beast described in ancient esoteric texts and by observers of
its stone idols, as well as a sole unfortunate eyewitness, as a “squid dragon”
with the head of a cuttlefish, writhing feelers on its mouth, prodigiously
clawed hands and legs, scaly wings, a rubbery body, and a bloated anthropoid
general outline.

Cthulhu
has dwelled for eons, neither quite dead nor alive, but dreaming, along with
its unholy worshippers, in its home in the eldritch sunken city of R’lyeh, the
“dripping Babylon of elder daemons,” which rises to Earth’s surface only after
great earthquakes. R’lyeh, when risen to the ocean surface, is reported to be a
Cyclopean ruin of mud, ooze, and massive stone monoliths, towers, and
worshipful bas-reliefs.

Cthulhu
goes by many names, including the Thing of the Idols, the Titan Thing of the
Stars, the Green Sticky Spawn of the Stars, the Thunder Down Under, and the
Master of Disaster. Whether it’s male, female, or genderless, it is clearly in
need of a long-overdue intergalactic spanking from its mommy or daddy, if
indeed it has such things. It has been reported to cause instant madness and
even instant death in men upon the simple viewing of its corporeal form.

The only reported physical
sighting of Cthulhu occurred in a lonely patch of the South Pacific in 1925,
but legends of its appearance in dreams stretches back for centuries. However,
its last verified dream sightings were in a series of nocturnal visits to
singer/songwriter Roy Orbison in 1963. On these occasions, Orbison said Cthulhu
appeared to him as a candy-colored clown they call the Sandman, tiptoeing to
his room every night, just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper “Go to sleep,
everything is alright.” In dreams, he walked with Roy. In dreams, he talked to Roy. Only in dreams, in terrible dreams.

* Note: This list includes only
Lovecraft’s solo writings and does not include his collaborations,
ghost-writings, or the broader Cthulhu Mythos of other authors

**Bonus entry: Impure
Genes & People of ColorFor
Lovecraft, minorities were almost as horrifying as the ghastly world-ending
pagan god-things from across the cosmos, and white and Western men and women
who mixed with them were only 2% less horrid. Lovecraft’s racial opinions
cannot be endorsed in the modern day, or be publised without remarking that his
stories are rife with what he unfortunately refers to as shifty-eyed, low-down,
teeth-gnashing, back-stabbing, swarthy, degenerate, and fantastically ugly
negroes, Indians, Orientals, Eskimos, mulattoes, mongrels, half-castes, hybrids
and racial undesirables of all sorts, and they’re never up to any good. His
lexicon of disparaging words for non-whites is almost as impressively broad as
that which he uses for his myriad alien worlds and weird creatures.

In addition to the explicit derogatory descriptions of racially mixed people,
Lovecraft frequently employs the recurring theme of the abject horror of hybrid
species and the genetic degradation of homo sapiens. The clearest examples are
to be found in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Lurking
Fear.” And don’t even get me started on Lovecraft’s clever names for black
cats.